As a young child in Sweden in the late ‘70s-‘80s, I was never conscious of any differences between boys and girls. Well, there were the holidays, when I got to wear a pretty dress rather than my normal dungarees. Then there was the fact that I wore my hair long and had to curtsy as opposed to bow to my older relatives. These things set me apart as a girl. But that was it!
It’s actually a girl!The toys I had, and enjoyed playing with, were mainly ‘unisex’ ones, such as Lego, Brio, Fisher-Price etc. (I am not complaining about that though!)

Gender in Story Books

I quite enjoyed fairy tales featuring beautiful princesses. However it was very clear that they lived in a different world, a different time. I did not identify with them. I knew I was a modern child.

The story-book children I did identify with were usually ‘modern’ children of either gender. The setting would often be on something politically correct, such as a single shift-working father trying buying a pink rabbit for his little son. (I am not joking, there really is a popular series of children’s books in that setting, see picture below.)
On his way to the daycare center…
This PC series is best-selling in Sweden.
My nursery school was in an old building, and part of it had not been ‘modernised’. There was a corner in the old section of the building which held book cases with some older children’s books. These books held a fascination for me. They were well-worn, a bit fragile and quite different from the books I was used to. Being a book-lover even at a young age, I spent a lot of time in that corner, browsing through the old books, many of which were the famous children’s classics by Elsa Beskow, or religious books with a moral theme.
But I couldn’t help loving these
picture books by Elsa Beskow!
I loved the detailed and colourful pictures of ‘Mother’ in an apron in the kitchen, and ‘Father’ with his hat on, on his way to work! It somehow seemed more appropriate than the scenarios in some of the modern books. The little boys and girls in the pictures would wear different clothes and the mother would produce wonderful teas in the kitchen. (And the cute dog was called Spot and had his own dog house!)

When I asked the teacher at the state nursery if we could read from these books instead of the modern ones, the answer was ‘no’. Instead we got more of the politically correct books about children in single-parent families, refugee children etc. Perhaps I am exaggerating a bit in this, but I think children should be presented with desirable ideals, not unfortunate compromises such as one-parent families.

There was constant talk even in nursery school about how traditional split of work between the genders must stop. There certainly was no question of having pretty dolls for girls to play with; we all played with nice but very gender-neutral toys. I suppose there was a slight bias towards the kinds of toys you’d traditionally give to a boy actually. We played a lot outside, building snow houses or huts where we played house.

Following the constant talk about the division of labour in the home, I remember forgetting totally that my father was doing very long hours in the office and supporting a family of five. Instead I narrowed in on the fact that he wasn’t pulling his weight in the area of household work. I often asked him “Daddy, why don’t YOU cook dinner tonight? It was the sort of question that children in the PC story books would ask. It’s funny how it never occurred to me that his work, including travel and plenty of stress, meant that he was ‘spent’ by the time he came home.
Picture of a girl in a
Reader by Elsa Beskow
I was very unimpressed by my mother who belonged to the extremely small minority of Swedish women who did not work outside the home. At some point I must have been taught that women who were housewives did so because they were lazy. It was frowned upon as something bourgeois at any rate. I was quite embarrassed she didn’t work and wished she’d get a job so I could join the ‘after-school care centre’ which practically all of my classmates attended.

My mother told me she chose not to work because it was better for us children and because running a household to a high standard was a full-time job anyway. I thought she was misguided, but didn’t pursue it. Having a mother who didn’t work set me apart and I didn’t like it.

I also believed that my grandmother was horrendously exploited by my grandfather because she did all household work in their home. When I raised this with her and she didn’t seem to agree that it was a problem, I put it down to the fact that she had been brainwashed her entire life…
Different time, different values…

Discovering ‘Girlie-ness’..

As I got older and was able to read myself, I discovered the “girls’ books” genre. I read with great pleasure such books as ‘Pollyanna’, ‘The Secret Garden’, ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and countless others. Gradually I started to notice that the heroines of these books generally put a big emphasis on being girls and on taking pride in that. It was something I had never done. I started having a feeling I was somehow missing out on the experience of being a girl.
A Spanish Girl
Nicer than brown dungarees!
When going abroad to Southern Europe, I noticed that little girls there usually wore skirts and frequently even pretty dresses. I and my friends very rarely did. In fact I very rarely wore traditionally girly clothes at all. My parents told me that the Southern Europeans wore such clothes because they were old-fashioned, religious and couldn’t afford much clothes anyway. They made all these things sound very bad, which I as a child of course latched on to.

I also dreamed of wearing pink, or perhaps yellow clothes. But looking at photos, it would appear I was mainly in brown corduroy or navy cotton! (I’ve noticed that little girls in Sweden wear much more pink now. I am sure they are pleased about that!) I remember fantasizing about being asked to be a bridesmaid so I could wear a frilly dress and carry a bouquet of pretty cut flowers!

I was aware though that I was not supposed to want such things. You can’t climb trees and fences as well in a skirt as in trousers, so there was no rational reason for preferring it! How much easier it would have been if I had had developed an interest in car engines and felt a desire to wear more jeans (my mother disapproved of jeans and wouldn’t let me wear it!) Much ‘healthier’ and more PC!

In the ‘Narnia’ books which I loved over any other books that I owned, CS Lewis occasionally pointed out the differences between the boys and the girls in the story.
Girls will be girls in Narnia…!
Although I was not aware at the time of Lewis as anything other than a great story-teller, I noticed that throughout the series he was actually actively encouraging the girls to be more feminine and the boys to be more masculine. How very odd! Quite the opposite to anything that I had ever experienced! I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

By now, boys around me were starting to change. I could no longer win a game of wrestling against my younger brother. Unbelievable! I found it very hard to accept that he won because he was simply stronger than me, and that there wasn’t anything I could do about it. How unfair! My brother eventually told me that he didn’t want to wrestle with me any further!

Cheated! There IS a Difference!

When I started getting breasts and boys started changing their voices I felt somehow cheated.. There wasn’t supposed to be any difference between boys and girls! But we all started changing to be more and more different. The boys were getting violent, always fighting each other. They seemed to enjoy watching and teasing us girls while we started becoming interested in fashion, make-up and pop music.
Boys are different…
When boys started showing an awkward, partly teasing and/or violent interest in me I got scared. It became clear to me that they were very different from me and the other girls. They seemed unpredictable. A boy could be very nice one minute, the next minute pull my braids and call me names. I was totally unprepared for it. I was intimidated by the unknown, and felt it safer to stay away.

By now I was at boarding school and didn’t have any adults to turn to for discussing any of this. I lived in a girls’ house (dorm) and spent my spare time with my girlfriends.

The girls’ houses at school were nice and quite cosy. There was (usually) a sisterly athmosphere and the place was nicely decorated. The boys’ houses on the other hand were sparsely decorated, quite dark and gloomy and when I visited it always appeared as if everything was broken!
20 x this = chaos!
Visiting a boys’ house felt like visiting another planet. You certainly became quite aware you were at an institution (of learning). Usually one of the first thing you’d see was miscellaneous trophies won by the house in various sports. You might also see sports paraphernalia and things like the stuffed head of a moose or deer on the wall. Then you’d see paintings of impressive-looking benefactors or old boys. The next thing you’d notice was a smashed door panel somewhere, or a stairs banister that was loosing a few decorative bits! Quite frequently you’d hear some young boy being told off in no uncertain terms.. All and all, entering the boys’ houses was entering a different world!

(Attending this school was about as politically incorrect as you could get in Sweden at the time. The school was private and expensive. Media hated it and there were frequently negative stories about it in the press. It was (is) however the elite school in the country, originally a boys school. (Same sex education is illegal in Sweden, hence girls have been allowed since the 60s.))
Older Boys: Kept order using the fist…
There were also frequent stories of beatings taking place in the boys’ houses. Older boys would beat younger boys for any of a number of ‘crimes’. From time to time my male classmates would have the bruises to prove it. Usually they bragged about them and how much beatings they could take. Us girls would listen and chip in the occassional “Oh but that’s awful…!”

All of this seemed very alien and completely uncivilized to me. Nothing like that was going on in the girls’ houses. The very obvious differences between me and my girlfriends and our male classmates were obvious, and made me even more confused about boys. Like any sensible person I stayed away from the unknown…!

Another development was that I had discovered that my best topics in school were Sewing, Home Economics and Art! How embarrassing! I was best at all the ‘girly’ subjects (but had mediocre grades in everything else…)

My father was extremely un-impressed and told to me to get my Maths and English grades up. But since I never actually made any conscious effort to study and learn, I only had top grades in the subjects I was naturally good at!)
Errm, *blush*, this was one
of my best subjects.

Sewing is fun?!

At school, there was regularly a requirement for girls to wear a skirt and boys to wear a jacket and tie. The school was basically a bit traditional, a very negatively charged word in Sweden. This was the first time I experienced a body of authority setting different rules between boys and girls. I could hardly believe my ears. How dared they! Also, girls were automatically signed up for sewing and cooking classes. (The boys did some equivalent class; I have forgotten what it was.)

Along with several other girls I felt it was my duty to protest against the ‘discrimination’ regarding the sewing… We were brought up to jump at this sort of thing and many of us most certainly did! The school paid no attention though, and in the end, the whole thing faded away. The truth of the matter was that everybody thoroughly enjoyed the sewing classes! They became a highlight of the schedule as the teacher was kind and knowledgeable and you could chat and gossip as much as you liked during the ‘lesson’… Anybody who remotely applied themselves was able to secure a decent grade. As a grown up woman it is absolutely invaluable to be proficient in sewing.

Living with 40 other girls and a matron, I started reflecting on what it meant to be a woman as opposed to a man. How men and women are different and why the traditional gender roles differ so much. Previously I had only ever been encouraged to think of how I could be more like boys, and to watch out for any ‘discrimination’.

The matron was very strict on the boys, only letting them visit in the drawing room! She said !”At that age they’re all beasts, really! You girls are better off without them!” Any boy who didn’t behave like a perfect gentleman got thrown or bad-mouthed by her. A few select ones managed to pass her muster and got permission to stay and chat to us. I liked it that my virtue was something worth protecting. My own parents and state school had not seemed to think that my virtue mattered. I knew that matron only wanted to protect us because ultimately it was a good thing. She was very clear on wanting the best for us in all areas. It had nothing to do with ‘oppression’ or anything along those lines.

On Female Virtue: Girls are Different!

If boys and girls are the same, then where does that leave the girls when it comes to sex? Here is how it works out: It is the the male norm that goes…. (Meaning that it is assumed that girls should be as interested in it as boys are!)
Different situation in the rest of society….
The childhood friends I kept in touch with, and who were at state school, pretty much all lost their virginity at 13-15, usually while drunk. (How can this be desirable?) This was due to a combination of peer pressure and a lack of motivation to hold back. I much preferred my own situation over theirs. I liked it that my virtue was something worth protecting; not something embarrassing and outdated that you should get rid of as soon as you could, so that you could be ‘modern’ and ‘liberated’…

At state schools where they were bombarded with information about contraception, abortion etc, I guess they must have felt odd if they didn’t take advantage of these offers… ! I remember a friend laughing scornfully when I didn’t know that condoms were available with different ‘flavours’ at the age of 14. Now, why should a 14 year old girl know that? My friend expressed shock and outrage at my supposed “oppressed” and disadvantaged predicament. Why was I not aware of this, and who had denied me this important piece of information. (I had only the basic sex ed, skipping the extras, I guess).

Eventually I told my state school friends that I lost my virginity at 13 (this was not true..) and that it had been a bad experience, hence I did not want to talk about it… That lie saved me from being hassled about it further and improved my street cred a bit. When pressed for details I just repeated something from TV.
Check her finger. I guess they think
it’s cool to be drunk on town.
My friends certainly did not have intimate relationships because it gave them physical pleasure.(In fact, there was even bragging about what a pain in the neck it was but how they did it anyway. They felt they had to do it though, so they wouldn’t loose the guy…) The reasons probably had to do mainly with peer-pressure and because it was the norm. It was expected.(No doubt it became more enjoyable as they grew older, but wouldn’t it have been nice not to have these unpleasant experiences from their teenage years?)

The state of affairs at my boarding school were different. The rules there were intended to discourage contact between the sexes outside of the school day. You can imagine the reasons. But in a mixed school, contact is inevitable. The feeling about this among the girls was that it was if you really wanted to have a boyfriend, you should. But it was generally better to wait. If somebody didn’t wait she wasn’t harshly judged by her peers though, unless she had multiple boyfriends over a short period of time. (That was bad for the reputation of the house. The girl in question would be ostracized until she changed her ways or quit the school.) I suppose this school was still operating under 1950s or 60s standards on dating.

An American girl who was in my year wore a silver ring that she said she’d keep on until she lost her virginity (ideally on her wedding night). I was quite fascinated by the idea and she said several friends of hers in the States wore similar rings; it was a trend. She graduated with the ring on at 19 and I was impressed by this environment in which girls were strongly encouraged not have relationships at all until grown up. It’s rather surprising that her parents sent her to school in a country that they must have been aware is quite liberal on these things.
(This picture is from my actual school, last year!)
We did not really get up to much trouble - I am lucky to have gone there.
Judging from my experience at boarding school; my conclusion was that if left alone or actively discouraged, most girls are more than happy to abstain until their late teens. To expect them to take the same amount of interest in sex as boys do is just stupid. The matter isn’t high enough on a teenage girl’s agenda.

The negative experiences of my friends told me that this is the way it should be. Going down to the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, these are the morals that are being taught, that they majority abide by. In most of religious America it seems to be the same, although I only know that from TV. However for us in Northern Europe and particularly Sweden, things have been turned upside down on this matter!

Conclusion

It started becoming increasingly clear to me as if man and woman are two pieces of a puzzle that fit together because they are essentially differently shaped… That their physique and psyche complemented rather than duplicated eachother. The idea that they are identical pieces seemed to me as a tremendous misconception and I was terribly irritated at having been fed an incorrect version of things all through my childhood. What I had been told simply wasn’t true. All my recent experienced showed that men and women were different and that men could no less be like women than women could be like men.

Since I wouldn’t want a man who behaves and looks like a woman, it makes sense that a man wouldn’t want a woman who behaves and looks like a man! True?

Why this ridiculous pretense that we are the same, when we very obviously are not? If I had been brought up more as a girl/woman instead of a gender-neutral being, I would have been stronger and more confident as a woman today! As it is, I had to discover the hard way that I was not the same as a man in a multitude of ways. I spent many years at work, trying to emulate an ‘alpha’ male in my behaviour… (This is called ‘having leadership skills - I wanted it as I work in IT and had management aspirations.). It feels a bit pathetic how I tried to emulated a male behaviour, really.
Equal but different…Eventually I decided that I didn’t actually want to reach the highest positions, since I didn’t like what it did to my personality. I consciously re-learned to be a woman. Not that it was particularly difficult; it was my true nature all along.

I have no idea how the unisex ideal affected the boys around me. They too were brought up in a ‘unisex’ way.

I can tell you this though: In Sweden it is not common for men to help women with bags on public transport. Also, men expect women to regard sex in the same way as they do (i.e. casual unless expicitly stated otherwise…) They normally do not pay on dates, walk women home or pull out the chair for you etc.. Imagine my surprise when these things happened in England. I felt like a princess!

Until quite recently, every time I noticed a difference between me and men I kept thinking; this is wrong… I ought to be like the men… I felt like I was letting other women down unless I constantly strived towards the male ‘ideal’ that was set for Swedish women. I forced myself to carry heavy things (hurt my back badly when I moved!) to take work extremely seriously (with the result that I got very stressed out) and to never to be scared or cry. These were girly, i.e. bad things. But let me tell you, it’s hard work hiding your true nature and pretending to be something you are not! (I still do it all the time, at work .)

Discovering that being feminine is not a ‘crime’ (in fact, it can be a positive thing) was a big revelation for me. I don’t actually want to be like a man!

I wish Northern European society would stop denying women the opportunity to be female! What good does it really bring? Who benefits? Northern European women constantly come out as the most stressed and unhappy people around.

But even writing this, I feel guilty, like some kind of reactionary in society, a traitor to my gender or relic from the past; un-fit for this modern world. I would never dream of admitting to any of my friends or family that I actually prefer housework to salaried work, or that my current sense of fulfillment stems not from my successful career in IT, but from the charity work that I do with the elderly.

Technorati Tags: traditional values, old-fashioned,
anti-feminism,
feminine,
conservative